Running is Suffering since joining college team

Your screwed

Stop spending all your time making vlogs, getting in trouble with the NCAA, and promoting your water bottle company, and focus instead on school and running. You'll be surprised at how well you do when your focused on what got you where you are.

Have you spoken to your coach. If not ask him if you can meet with him/her. Tell them your issues. I don't have enough information, but are the workouts too easy or hard? Do you not have confidence in what you are doing? Have you gained or lost weight? Are you sleeping well? How are your eating habits? I'm really trying to help you, but need more information. Remember when you approach the coach be respectful.

I am definitely not Ryan Trahan but that was pretty funny.

Vladimir wrote:

Have you spoken to your coach. If not ask him if you can meet with him/her. Tell them your issues. I don't have enough information, but are the workouts too easy or hard? Do you not have confidence in what you are doing? Have you gained or lost weight? Are you sleeping well? How are your eating habits? I'm really trying to help you, but need more information. Remember when you approach the coach be respectful.

Thanks for the response. Many of the workouts are not only too hard, but often impossible for me to complete at my current fitness level. Also, it is increasingly difficult to hit times because of all the lifting and core that we do. I feel very overtrained right now. It is very frustrating because I have worked extremely hard and have managed to be in the best aerobic shape of my life. However, since getting here my legs are constantly burning and feel heavy and awkward on every run. It feels very hard to go fast and even easy runs are a struggle. I am sleeping well and eating well as I always do. I do not believe I am deficient in anything but I could be due to the overtraining. Also, I definitely am having a hard time buying into and having confidence in my coach because of how I feel right now and I seem to be getting worse. Race times and workouts are getting worse as well.

College ruins athletes...

I struggled freshman year too, even though I was usually top finisher on my mediocre D1 XC team that year.

The upperclassmen ran workouts and easy runs harder than I could handle. I finally started doing easy runs on my own a minute slower than the 6:00 or faster pace they ran. I also didn't go crazy in workouts. All long runs I did on my own when possible, much slower than my older teammates ran. They were baffled how I always beat them in XC races that fall.

Later I transferred to a highly ranked D1 team and was shocked how much easier and reasonable the training was.

Terger wrote:

However, since getting here my legs are constantly burning and feel heavy and awkward on every run. It feels very hard to go fast and even easy runs are a struggle

Judging by what you posted, the good news is you aren't badly overtrained. That would be sleeping even more and then being tired when you do get up.

The bad news is, it sounds like you are racing every workout and you, rightly, sense it is too much.

How many weeks into "too much" are you? Does the training schedule taper at all in the near future?

pop_pop!_v2.2.1 wrote:

Terger wrote:

However, since getting here my legs are constantly burning and feel heavy and awkward on every run. It feels very hard to go fast and even easy runs are a struggle

Judging by what you posted, the good news is you aren't badly overtrained. That would be sleeping even more and then being tired when you do get up.

The bad news is, it sounds like you are racing every workout and you, rightly, sense it is too much.

How many weeks into "too much" are you? Does the training schedule taper at all in the near future?

Conference is in November and the taper is scheduled to begin two weeks prior to the conference meet. I just feel like by then I will be injured or so burned out that it doesn't even matter. Also, I am racing the workouts because that is what we are being coached to do. I disagree with it and that is why I want to just run on my own again.

Not to be a jerk, but you probably came in undertrained. Nothing wrong with that.

Your cross season will end early, before the conference and regional runners' seasons. You'll have a little extra time to build into it, and build to what you now know is the expectation.

Your travk season will also be hard, and follow the pattern of ending early, but eventually you'll get there.

Keep the bar high. Bodies are pretty adaptable, much more than a lot of guys give themselves credit for. It'll suck, but so what? It won't suck forever, and you'll come out with the wisdom and experience that future freshman on your team will need to hear as they go through their own struggles.

Tipp wrote:

Not to be a jerk, but you probably came in undertrained. Nothing wrong with that.

Your cross season will end early, before the conference and regional runners' seasons. You'll have a little extra time to build into it, and build to what you now know is the expectation.

Your travk season will also be hard, and follow the pattern of ending early, but eventually you'll get there.

Keep the bar high. Bodies are pretty adaptable, much more than a lot of guys give themselves credit for. It'll suck, but so what? It won't suck forever, and you'll come out with the wisdom and experience that future freshman on your team will need to hear as they go through their own struggles.

I know that I came in undertrained. However, I won't get any better at the rate that I am going. I need time to build up to the mileage that is expected. I ran 70 mile weeks for the first time this past summer, but that did not get the job done.

I ran way slower than HS my first year of college. I could not even get within 10 seconds of my HS 1500m time. I ran a lot more volume and workouts were managable, but I was behind most of the team. I felt like crap for an entire year. My legs were heavy, my stomach was always upset, I was tires but slept fitfully.

In my Sophomore year I set a 30 second PR in the 3k in my first indoor race. I was leaner and more efficent than I had ever been in HS. Around that time 80 miles a week started to feel easy. I'd go on 6 mile cool downs and post race runs without issue.

I neve thought twice about continuing with the team early on in my career, but when I became an upperclassmen I was amazed at the number of freshmen frustrated by the lack of immediate results. Stick with it.

I was in the same boat about 30 yrs ago. I was running 10Ks two minutes slower my freshman year of college than in my senior year of high school due to overtraining. When I started I wondered why there were like 15 freshman, 5 sophomores, 3 juniors, and 1 senior on the XC team. My conclusions were as follows. The workouts were designed to enable people to score at the conference and national meets THIS season. From the perspective of the coach, if you can't score at those meets you are of no value to him. So, if you aren't good enough to meet the high expectations in workouts and this results in overtraining and poor performances, no matter to the coach, you wouldn't be scoring for him anyway. The coach was looking out for his short term interests only (i.e., his job next season) and not the best long-term interests of the runners. What made no sense to me is why he didn't try to bring freshman and sophomores along at a slower pace on the thinking that they might be able to score at important meets as juniors or seniors, and save the do or die workouts for the juniors and seniors. Me and another guy on the team quit the team, trained on our own and saw massive improvements training ourselves at workloads we could handle. As I am still running 30 years later, I am not generally a quitter and don't regret my decision to quit my college XC team as a freshman one bit. It worked out better for me. Perhaps you could talk to the coach about your probable overtraining and that workouts need to change, but depending on the mindset of your coach your best choice may be to quit and run on your own, or transfer to another school with a coach who has a different coaching philosophy that you have carefully investigated by conversing with current and former runners. One final note of caution on the transfer possibility, coaches often change universities and you could get screwed.

I agree with a lot of the responses so far.

I walked on a D1 P5 conf team. I was very under-trained. Freshman year, I was expected to run 4 mile tempos at my previous 5K PR pace! I hung on for my life.

I was shocked at not just the volume in training, but also the intensity.

I struggled mightily. I was always tired. I trained through every meet so my times were not good--like 26:00 8K.

But, come outdoor, my body had started to adjust and I cracked off a pretty good 5K (14:4X) that made me realize that I might actually be able to contribute and be a legit D1 athlete. I'm still running and my times have continued to drop. I'm one of the top guys on the team, qualified for regionals, etc.

So, I would say to have patience. Stick with it. But, I would do two things differently. One, get even more sleep if you can. Two, take the easy days easy. Don't feel like you have to run with the guys who want to run 10 miles at 6:00 pace on an easy day. Run them at 7:00 pace. You'll get flack, but you'll recover and race better.

Good luck!

Thanks for the responses! I am trying to figure it out and this has helped.

Terger wrote:

Workouts have went terrible ..... I am not sure what to do.

Concentrate on your studies.

what to do? wrote:

Terger wrote:

Workouts have went terrible ..... I am not sure what to do.

Concentrate on your studies.

I care way more about running than I do about my studies. That is probably evident. This may not be a good thing, but it is the truth.

Have you talked to your coach about any of this?

Sticking it out is the way to go. Just have fun. You said you are just average anyway.